My name is June and I'm a blogger

I'm still here. 

Over here, behind the floor plant, leaning to  my extreme right, trying to get some lamplight onto my knitting in order to save my sight until I finish this baby blanket. The yarn is very soft and slippery and slides very easily off my needles, so I can't do this job by feel. The blanket is for one of the poor souls who is still employed at Small Pond, and whose baby is due in January. I hope to have this project finished and delivered long, long before the baby's here. Or rather . . . there . . . with her. Not here, please God. 

I, myself, am no longer employed at Small Pond. I retired on my 65th birthday, the soonest I was eligible to collect my pension. I continued to work two days per week for three months. On the morning of the twentieth of September, as my boss and I were chatting pre-actual-work, I said, "Bill. I think I'm finished."

"You're finished."

"Yes. I think I am."

"Do you have a date for this?"

"Yes. Today. At four o'clock."

And so it was done. My whole week, my whole life: my own.

I have been having The Time of My Life enjoying the freedom of being socially acceptably unemployed! I love it when people say to me that I have earned it. Oh my, have I ever earned this. My retirement routine is still evolving. I'm still just doing small things that I want to when I want to, spending much too much of my time cuddling with and talking to Molly and Peep, but then, that's what they're here for, isn't it?

I feel sure that the following two items are related somehow.

1. I was gobsmacked by the results of the presidential election. Sick at heart and stomach. For a few days I engaged in commenting on news stories, but that just makes me angrier, so I think I've stopped that.

2. Today, on a full moon impulse, after I finished at the supermarket, I took the hour-long drive to my childhood home. 

Just to see, just to breathe the air there. 

It's been more than forty years since I've driven past the old farmhouse, although I've Google Earth'd it many times. The route there and back revealed such changes, yet the geography alone pulled me onto the proper roads. ("Is that the road? That's the hill...") And it was. Amazing.

It's no surprise that the space between the house and the road (the space that I ran madly across to try to get on the school bus before I was old enough to go to school, lunch bucket full of rocks rattling in my hand) is not acres wide, that the tree that held our rope and board swing is not The Big Tree of memory, but only a reasonably sized tree. It's dead now, the top all wrecked and broken, covered with vines. The pond appears to be much larger than it was when I was nine or ten, probably because more of that area was then swamp and less of it pond. It's where we gathered up frog eggs and jarred them, watching as they turned into pollywogs and then set them free back in their home. 

Maybe the moral of my story is simply that all things change, but I'm still here. Still breathing. (Thank you, Friko.)

Lightening the load

It's a trifle over two solid weeks that I've been walking a two-mile route. Once a day, morning or evening. Sometimes, if my Achilles tendons are tight and sore, it isn't even the two-mile route, but rather the half-mile driveway loop. I weighed myself a week ago and had lost nothing. I kept at it, thinking that with the eating habits changing and the moving-instead-of-sitting-for-the-equivalent-length-of-time, something would have to give.

Alors!

This morning: five pounds lighter!

It's like throwing a deck chair off the Queen Mary.

Moi, après le déluge

I drove through the village this afternoon......thought maybe, since the road was open again, some places might be open for business. I thought I'd go and see if the Community Apothecary was open. I left a prescription there Saturday morning to pick up on Monday.
Uh. 

No.

I had no conception, despite the pictures and the videos, of the immense reach of the flood. The little league fields at the outskirts of the village . . . the markings and fences are there. The creekside pavilion next to them is a hundred feet from where it was. The pavilion's picnic tables are upside down, way up next to the road....washed upward fifty feet, and hundreds of feet south of where they started. 
The 300-year-old stone house is there, and solid, its front yard rail fence plastered with dusty matted waterlogged brush and weeds. 
My drugstore with the windows and greeting card racks empty, my hairdresser's machinery and pedicure chairs piled up in the parking lot, the library with the filth matted against the caved-in latticework porch skirting . . . all dusted with dry mud . . . the antique camelback loveseat, from one of the little reading nooks, outdoors and all brown-murky-smeared, tipped on its back.
No way to turn around until I got to Bridge Street, now bridgeless and closed after the first block. The macadam that, in June, I waited in line for and detoured around, smelling then its fresh rich intoxicating oil and tar scent. I watched it being rolled and pressed beautifully smooth. It's all peeled up and washed far away. I turned and came up the back street with the big pretty houses. Muddy, filthy, soaked, formerly (five days ago) elegant furniture, and piles of lumber and torn-out hunks of ruined pink fiberglass insulation out in the yards. 

Porta-potties here and there.

People in rubber boots and rubber gloves and filthy legs standing looking at the mess, carrying buckets up and down the street.

A big sign: "CLAIM INFORMATION HERE" and "VOLUNTEERS, THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS YOU."  

The whole area stinks. 

I don't know what the stink is. It isn't sewage stink, although that's part of it. The closest I can come to a description is: rot and silty creekbottom mud.

Beyond heartbreaking; stomach-turning.

A fire policeman whose left arm must have been so tired, pointing me to the detour up over one of the hill roads. Oddly, interestingly, the old, old plank bridge is intact, although I could see where the creek had surged right over it.

I have seen this stuff on the news, in Arkansas or Louisiana or someplace and I have thought, "Oh those poor people..." but this! These are places I know by smell and sound, and it's all a wreck from one end to another. Must I see every disaster first hand to feel true sympathy for others who've had these experiences? 

If this is this horrible, what must it be like in places where it's been wearing down for tens, for hundreds of years?

I drove down the driveway and breathed deep breaths of spicy wet leaf scent. The house had had little bits of leaves stuck to it through Monday, but they've dropped off and blown away now. I drove into the barn and got out of the car, turned and stood a minute ignoring the dogs' hysterical hello barks from the front doors. 

I looked at my nice clean dry house with a nice clean dry mattress to go to sleep on tonight, and I thanked God most heartily.

Counting down

Image from  from I LOVE TYPOGRAPHY

I have two and one-half hours to eat, drink beverages, smoke, chew gum, before I shall sew my lips closed until after surgery. It's a wonder I'm using my fingers to type; I should have rigged up a bungee cord around my neck with a plate suspended at my chin. Or a feedbag.


In twelve hours I will be approaching the La-La Land of general anesthesia. I am promised an aperitif of Versed if I am nervous. The nurse warned me that it might make me "a little woozy."  
"Woozy's good," I told her. (Listen: I stopped drinkin', but I can still enjoy a little justified, supervised woozy when the occasion warrants.)


I gather I'll be under for less than an hour, and then comes that waking up process with the nurse urging me to take ever-deeper breaths when all I'll want to do swat her out of my way so I can go back to sleep. I'm not looking forward to that but I won't remember much of it anyway. 


And then home with Husband, who will be close at hand until he has to travel on Wednesday.
...at which time I will have a friend come to babysit me. 
I have made her promise to sit next to my bed and read fairytales to me should I request it.

Illumination

Cloud shadows pass over the hills. Where there was sun, a shadow as big as the whole hill. And then it passes on to the next hill, leaving illumination in its path.
In the mornings the western slopes are dark, in the evening, the eastern sides lie in the shadow of the hill's own mass.
Each hill and each hillside get their shares of both the light and the dark.


I am no more or less than the trees on those hills. I am no more important or necessary in this world than the wildflowers or the geese or the rabbit or the deer. I am no less important either. We are each one of a kind and we are all of a piece. We all live, go dormant, bloom, grow. We all thrash in the winds of the storm, shelter ourselves from wild weather, lose pieces of ourselves and grow protective scars. In this season of young tomato plants growing from seed, growing daily larger and stronger, even after some small unmeant carelessness breaks a branch, I see quite clearly that living things want nothing more than to go on living and growing. We can't help it: We all go on because Life makes it easier to go on than to cease. 


I hope the illumination that I feel, in the wake of this latest passing cloud, remains.
I hope I don't forget how fortunate I am to be alive.
No matter what.

Live like you were dying

On April 9, I went to the doctor for a long overdue checkup. And because I had found a lump where a lump should not be. 

On April 12, I had some non-invasive diagnostic tests.

On April 13, I had a biopsy done. Four skinny little worms of core samplings of my tissue laid on a saline-soaked gauze pad. The doctor showed them to me. I could see the white of the tumor among the pink of the apparently normal tissue. They looked like two-and-a-half-inch-long strips of chicken meat, with a little white fat.

I got dressed and met the surgeon in the hall at a little writing desk.  He told me where the tissue would go, when the results would be back. He was putting a rush on it, he said, and I should have my husband with me, or a friend, on April 16.

That's when I made The Mistake.

I asked him, "What do you think?"

He said: "I'm concerned that it's a breast cancer. But I've been wrong. That's why we do biopsies."

For a good portion of the drive home, I was talking to myself.  

• Of course he thinks it might be cancer. Why else would I be having a biopsy? 
• There are lumps that aren't cancer.
• You don't know yet. You don't know yet. You don't know yet.

Jack Daniels whispered in my ear, "Let's talk it over." He was my companion in times of trouble for so long that it was a simple reflex of my brain.

I stopped and bought a chocolate mocha cake.

I stopped and filled the car's tank with gasoline.

I cried the three miles home from the gasoline station.

The trees, just beginning to be limned in green fuzzy buds. The sky. The hills. The hills!

I said to my Higher Power, "Please let Heaven be at least as beautiful as this."

When I was little, the beginning of summer vacation felt like standing on a mountaintop in the sunshine, surveying a limitless number of days of reading, playing croquet or cowboys, long warm evenings of catching lightning bugs.  Now I know school summer vacation is sixty-five finite days.

Driving home, stopping at the mailbox, coming down the driveway and seeing the house that we built standing against the background of hill and sky, driving into the barn, turning off the car, hearing the dogs' ecstatic barking: all were numbered now. Tick, tick, tick off a list of checkboxes.

I got out of the car, clutching the mail and cakebox.  


I let the dogs out and we walked around the yard. I stopped in the front walk and let out my two milligrams of Fiery Anger: I deserve MORE. I deserve BETTER! 


We all came inside and I fixed the dogs' supper. I told myself I should go outdoors and enjoy the weather, but my body was too tightly clenched.  I took off my clothes and put on my robe . . . and went on this informative and comforting website.  

...and then decided if I wasn't dead yet, and if the treatment might not kill me, I might as well go outside and live. That's when I got the garden trowel and Max's ball...

The sky was even bluer than before, the clouds perfect little puffs of silver white, the hills stronger and more steadfast.  The dogs' voices were music, the dandelions snapped out of the garden beds as if they were joyfully jumping free.  The trees, the messy brush and weeds along the stone walls, were just as they should be and impossibly beautiful in their perfect random arrangements.  The breeze was perfume. I laughed with the love of all of it. 

I brought in a wagonload of firewood against the forecasted damp cool days. What patience I had with that process . . . a chore that I have habitually hurried through, making it harder than it had to be.  Like so much of life.

On April 16, the surgeon's office phoned at 12:40. The doctor had a cancellation, could I come in at 1:30 instead of 4:00?

"I would be delighted," I said. "Let me call my husband and I'll call you back in five minutes."

Husband said, "Sure.  I'll meet you at the doctor's office." I called the office to say I would be there within the hour.

We sat in the examining room for ten minutes before Dr. S. blew in, dressed in blue scrubs that matched his eyes. He was smiling.

"You have everybody confused!" he told me.

"The lab always has two people look at each sample. One said, 'I think it's...' The other said, 'Mmm, it might be, but I don't know.' So . . . your tissue has been sent to Yale for examination."

I had been prepared for "It's nothing," or "You're dying." So unprepared was I for nuanced speech that I couldn't grasp what Husband was able to hear. Between Dr. S. and Husband I finally understood that yes, it is cancer, but most likely (no one wants to say it out loud until Yale weighs in) it's cancer that is usually encapsulated and doesn't go speeding off to lymph nodes. Dr. S. hastened out of the room and back with his book, "The Breast," and showed me pictures of the likely suspect: "This is what it looks like under the microscope."

Usually this kind of cancer occurs in two percent of breast cancers . . . in non-Caucasian women fifteen or twenty years older than I am. That's why the lab technicians are so keen to make sure that it's what they think it is.

All the way home, the completely overcast sky looked bright blue. 

May 6 at 9:00am we will have confirmation.

And we will proceed.

Given the choice, I wouldn't have missed this last week for anything.

"And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter, 

"And I gave forgiveness I'd been denying."

~ from Live Like You Were Dying, Tim McGraw

Thank you to Hilary at 

The Smitten Image

4/21/2010

The old Dell

I wrote once about The Demise of the Dell, but in that post I concentrated more on Uniting With the New HP than on the death of the old laptop. 

Many photos and journal entries are still locked inside that old machine. The poor thing doesn't know when I've inserted a cd, so I can't pull off the memory. I need a professional to do that and I haven't asked one yet. Knowing what I know, I wonder why I don't do backup cds with this HP laptop. Silly.

Look at this poor old thing. 

 See where the arrow key at the lower right fell off? I was able to reattach it several times (it had little folding legs on the bottom that reminded me of an antique wood-and-canvas folding lawn chair) and finally gave up and became accustomed to using that key without the smooth flat surface of its cover/face/whatever it's called.

See the darkened spots at both sides from my forearms and the heels of my hands?  ...and how the blue is completely worn off on the left-click button?

See the dust and filth embedded in the corners of the touchpad and in between the keys?  

It's like looking at my life: Wounded and worn and cluttered up with the detritus of old food crumbs, old cigarettes, old dust . . . and inside, years of pictures and memories.  

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.  ~Madeleine L'Engle 

Old business: Update on "A cloud outshone by its silver lining"

I know all of you have been on the edges of your seats waiting to hear the denouement, so here it is:
My title, salary, and hours have changed to, overall, "less." I had suggested the change (essentially reversion to my pre-department-head classification) to Power That Be in a conversation some weeks ago.  My days are still partly in Morning Job and partly in Afternoon Job, but the Morning Job portion is reduced by one hour. My workday begins at 9am instead of 8am. 
I am pleased with this change for these reasons:

• Three hours of daily torture is always preferable to four
• Breezing in at 9am feels like having had half a day off
• I have gained some points in the overall scheme of Power That Be to achieve a larger project, my salary having been a point of contention in discussions
• I am still health-insured
• It could be a lot worse
• And, finally, the flush of joy at housecleaning did, as Friko suggested, wear off rather rapidly.

A cloud outshone by its silver lining

Last week Morning Boss allowed me to overhear her side of a telephone conversation that left me with no doubt about her impression of Things To Come. The following is what I heard:

"[Power That Be] is combining departments all over the place. He's got the [Afternoon Job] department all in one room downstairs, he's done that with [that other department]. I don't know what his plan is for my department."

Pause for listening to the other end of the conversation.

"I know one who's gonna be goin'.....they don't want to be here....they're like a different person! It's nothin' I did....so why do I feel so awful?"

From the description of the "they" (and oh! how I wanted to call across to correct her grammar, "one" not being a "they"), I recognized that I was her subject.

The governing board will meet tomorrow evening, during which, if my interpretation of what I heard is correct, there will be an executive session to discuss personnel matters, with one of two outcomes:

1. My employment will be full-time in Afternoon Job;
2. My employment will be reduced to part-time only, but in Afternoon Job (the "why do I feel so awful?" part indicates that's Jane's expectation).

During this "overhearing" (it could hardly be called eavesdropping since we were separated by ten feet of mere air) I pretended to concentrate on the self-assigned task of the manual that I'm writing and organizing, but my right ear stretched and grew toward Jane until it drooped onto the adding machine keys.  The relief that washed over me made it difficult not to smile and sigh happily.  For the rest of the week's mornings, I had no work to do aside from answering the telephone. I handled no cash, no checks. Indeed, Jane pushed me aside as I began to sort the incoming mail.  All the week's evenings, Husband and I discussed the effects of a sharply reduced household income and the loss of health insurance . . . and the necessity and immeasurably beneficial psychic effect of my release from Morning Job.

The foregoing is merely to explain my happily changed focus since Thursday when Husband and I concluded separately, together, and finally, that no matter what happens, we will be all right.

I went to the supermarket and shopped as if my income had already been more than halved. I spent less than half what I would have spent a month ago and came home with more.

I rejoiced in the prospect of having daily daylight hours to walk, with the dogs, without the dogs...even at dawn, since I wouldn't need to be on the road to work until late morning.

I thought about having to give up my biweekly cleaning person. A sadness, that, since I find no joy in sweeping floors and Husband is a little persnickety in that area. Years ago I read an article about a woman and her adult daughter who were enthusiastic cleaners. The mother was quoted: "Ammonia is the only cleaner you'll ever need." The daughter, whose bent seemed to me near a break, couldn't bear to use balsamic vinegar on her salad because it made her lettuce look dirty. At the time I thought Husband would have enjoyed being married to either one. 

However.

On Saturday I happily cleaned baseboards. On Sunday I dragged out the step-stool and climbed up and cleaned and polished the upper kitchen cabinets and their crown molding. Very satisfying.

I moved my Swiffer to the front of the broom closet and dug through the kitchen towel drawer for my microfiber cleaning cloths.

I swept up firewood debris, and whisked up stove ashes as soon as it could be done without setting the broom afire.

Ammonia be damned: Scrubbing bubbles are my new best friends. I shall be searching for cans of the stuff in bulk.

When vegetable gardening time comes, I will be able to weed at will.

I might be about to get my Donna Reed wish! 

At least part-time.

Tennessee hankerin'

It's probably as much a wish to retire as it is a wish to move. 

I have once again been looking at online real estate listings, 
more or less in the Knoxville general area.  
The prices for houses amaze me. 

These places would be listed here for half again as much!

Imagine waking up in this aerie room, and not being in a vacation rental!

This view would make me feel right at home.

A real honest-to-God, hand-hewn log cabin!  I wonder how long it would take before I got worn out with brown walls everywhere. 

But doesn't it look cozy?

Even this one....tiny, tiny, is just so dang cute! 

It looks a lot like the replica cabin at Davy Crockett's birthsite!

I'm about to reveal some of my stereotyped "moving south" worries.  

Call it ignorance if that's what it is, and feel free to enlighten me.

These are the things that worry me:

...that I wouldn't be social enough, girly enough. 

...that I wouldn't be God-fearin' enough.

...that I might be a tad too politically left-leaning. 

Can a woman born and raised in "one of the most liberal regions in the United States" find happiness in a dark pink state?

I want to move to Tennessee

I spent some time today online looking at Tennessee rural real estate ads.  I've never been there, even for a visit, so I don't know one county from another, or what cities to search in, but it's a little dream I indulge every now and then.  If I stay in this state I will never retire; the state and county taxes would render life as I know it extinct.  Tennessee seems a lot more economical.  And Tennessee scenery looks a lot like what I see here; that's important.  It's the same mountain chain, just farther south.

Image from Tennessee Text Wrestling

A few years ago there were some contractors from Tennessee  working on the local WalMart.  During our conversations in my office, one of them told me about his home in Dickson County.  He's the one who started this idea rolling around in my head, by telling me that he had all four seasons, but winter lasted only from late November through about February. I like my seasons, but I don't enjoy living with winter until late April. I'm afraid one of these winters I'll just grow roots into my couch and never be able to move again.

Election Day

As usual I am up and moving too early. I would like to think that with this extra time I will be up and out and voting on my way to work. More likely I'll fiddle around and waste this time and vote on my way home.

I know that I will be voting today.

Since I live two towns over from where I work, I won't be able to vote in the election that will affect my livelihood for a few years to come. Up for election, or in one case, re-election, three seats* on the board that governs the municipality for which I work.

The only position that holds any uncertainty is the top seat.

The result of this election will be governing board comprising:

• One convicted felon;
• One reasonable person;
• *One prince;
• *One apprentice prince;
• *And, in the center seat, either an unstable narcissist or an experienced, knowledgeable and realistic person.

It's an off year for national elections, but in my world this is it. There is a sense of gloom for those of us who anticipate these next few years with a board majority who thinks Nike's admonition to just do it is a valid mantra for governing. Just make the motions, pass the laws, demolish existing law . . . all without forethought, examination, or, indeed, any consideration of other laws violated by those actions.

The bottom line, and face time on camera, are all to this majority.

Cut the budget; give away the store.

Remove from the budget all funds to pay for training and for the books that delineate the law to be enforced.

Truck away equipment as cost-free gifts to neighboring municipalities.

Move adding machine departments into the same square footage as departments with a lot of noisy public exposure.

If all this results in employee inefficiency, the felon announces at a public meeting: "We'll just get rid of the employees."

And the irony of it all is that there will be no reduction in taxes.

So I will vote.

My vote will make little difference to most of the hours of my waking life.

I will vote, in my hometown, for people with whom I would like to work.

It is possible, after all, that that might come to pass.